Cnu Teacher-donor Gets Budget Lesson

After $100,000 Gift, Professor Is Losing Job And Department

April 06, 2003|By JUSTIN GEORGE Daily Press

NEWPORT NEWS — In Room 118 in Christopher Newport University's Ratcliffe Hall is a sports-science laboratory of modest proportions -- the mark of a longtime professor who wanted to leave a lasting impression.

Bob Cummings sold one of the seven houses that he'd saved for retirement to raise $100,000 to pay for the room. A grateful CNU named the lab after him.

FOR THE RECORD - Published correction ran Tuesday, April 8, 2003.A story in Sunday's Local News section incorrectly stated that Christopher Newport University was a two-year college in 1976. It became a four-year college in 1971. (Text deleted.)

It was a personal and professional triumph for the professor, a first-generation college graduate whose parents never went beyond ninth grade -- a man who spent more than a quarter-century at CNU.

The equipment for the room began arriving in August, in time to help fall-semester students.

Two months later, Cummings learned that the lab would last only through the summer.

"I wanted to leave a legacy to the university," says Cummings, who teaches in the recreation, sport and wellness management department. "I'm remorseful about it. I'm also bitter. I invested my life here."

The 2003 class will be the first and the last to use the lab. CNU eliminated Cummings' department and two others, in what officials say was a difficult cost-cutting move.

"When the government and the General Assembly cut us by $7 million, the university had to make some decisions and priorities had to be selected, and these cuts were all unfortunate," says Jack Simms, a university vice president and executive director of the Education Foundation, CNU's fund-raising arm.

"It's a difficult time, and a difficult time for any professors who have lost their jobs."

The room seems crossed between a hospital and gym. A $33,250 egg-shaped "Bod Pod," which measures muscle mass, looks like an empty spaceship in one corner. Stationary-bicycle, curl-bar and computer carts take up another.

The equipment is the future of sports science and indicates how far the department has come during Cummings' tenure.

The 65-year-old Cummings is divorced, with a grown son and daughter and grandchildren. He paces around campus with the authority of a head coach. He coached soccer, but football players call out in recognition.

Cummings used soccer to plow his way out of inner-city Baltimore, where he grew up the son of a steelworker and a housewife in a blue-collar neighborhood.

"Nobody went to college," Cummings said.

But Cummings earned a soccer scholarship to the University of Maryland, where he became an honorable-mention All-American. He went on to earn a doctorate in physiology.

He arrived on the Christopher Newport campus in 1976, when the recreation department was a physical-education program with five instructors and offered no degrees.

In 1979, as department chairman, Cummings helped lobby the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia for a major to offer students. But because nearby universities already issued physical-education degrees, Christopher Newport was granted leisure studies.

The new major allowed the college to issue degrees with concentrations in recreation and tourism, sports and wellness and exercise science, a program that Cummings created.

Over the years, he helped grow the department from one that fulfilled electives to a program that helps students become exercise physiologists, nutritionists, dietitians, physician's assistants and physical therapists. More than 150 have graduated since 2000.

In the fall of 2001, Cummings made his pledge after, he said, the Education Foundation approached him, promoting tax deductions. The lab was Cummings' idea, Simms said.

The professor made about $71,000 a year then. His donated house sold for a net gain of $61,000.

"I'm not a rich man, I'm not a poor man," he said. "But I have a lot of feelings for my students and this university. And that's the reason why I've done it."

The Education Foundation initiated him as a member of the Founder's Circle -- whose members have pledged at least $100,000 through the years, putting him in the company of 53 others. The college president and mayor honored him. The foundation put a blue sign outside the lab: "The Dr. Robert H. Cummings Human Performance Lab."

He made his pledge, Cummings says, to push his department closer to CNU President Paul Trible's vision.

"When Trible came in, he sold me on what he was doing," he says. "I bought into this place because Trible was getting great students, facilities and even built dorms. This place was booming!"